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Spam Lives (I'm afraid) 6 October 2003 Edition
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A regular Aardvark reader has told me that he recently received a "marketing" email from Air New Zealand, which isn't unusual -- lots of companies stay in touch with customers by email and let them know of special deals or rates.

He was concerned however, that this email had a deceptive subject line that started with "Re:".

What's going on AirNZ? Are you preparing to get into the spam business?

Surely if you're sending email only to those people who have requested such marketing messages then there's no need to trick people into opening it is there?

And while on the subject of spam, it might pay to have a read of this story [The Age] which shows how the Aussie's proposed anti-spam legislation might not be everything it's cracked up to be.


The Aardvark PC-Based Digital
Entertainment Centre Project

Yes, at last, this feature has been updated again! (31 Mar 2003)

Why is this important to us?

Well I seem to recall that our own ITC minister, you know -- the guy who once said that the issue of spam was "too hard" for legislators, has subsequently suggested that we might follow Australia's lead in respect to such laws.

Oh dear!

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And here's something that will probably strike terror into your heart...

It seems that after years of battling thieves who keep ripping up copper phone and data lines to sell as scrap metal, Nigeria has decided to launch a wireless mobile Internet service.

Yes, now all those Nigerian scammers can offer you a share of their MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN US CURRENCY from the comfort and convenience of their taxi-cab or bicycle.

And it seems that the criminals been quick to take advantage of this greatly improved internet connectivity. In celebration of the event, it seems that MR ADU BUNABUDABI PRES has been trying to find victims (oops, I mean helpful souls) to launder a large sum of unclaimed money through an account at a fake Lloyds Bank website.

And finally for today (while I'm on a roll), some idiot used my yahoomail.com email address ("Dontspam") last week when they listed their site on a raft of web directory websites.

The guy who did it (Craig) tells me he didn't think anyone would be using my address and is now awfully regretful, especially after I offered to forward the resulting spam to him :-)

But, just in case you're ever tempted to use these "free" services to boost traffic to your website I can tell you that you will be spammed to eternity and back if you do.

My Yahoomail account is now collecting around 90 additional spams per day right now and it's easy to see that they've originated from these link-sites. The spams are for valueless things like MLM schemes, other link-sites, etc.

And the cunning thing is that unless you use a valid address, the sites won't display your listing because they require response to a confirmation email (with advertising) first.

I'm also informed that appearing on some of these link-sites will actually do more harm than good because it's possible that several of the more popular search engines actually demote sites that they find there.

One thing's for sure -- spam is still a problem!

If any Aardvark readers want to share an opinion on today's column or add something, you're invited to chip in and have your say in The Aardvark Forums or, if you prefer, you can contact me directly.

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